The Driver Who Knows The Route

There is a driver who does the airport hotel run in eleven minutes. Everybody else takes nineteen. He is not driving faster.

He knows the barrier on the west entrance takes ninety seconds and the east one is unmanned after eleven. He knows the concierge at one hotel will phone the room and the one across the road will not. He knows which three streets close on a Saturday for the market.

He is not on next Friday.

The eight minutes are not his

⚠️ What that driver knows is your operating margin, and it lives in one person's head.

The instinct is to treat it as talent — he is just good at this. Some of it is. Most of it is a list of about forty facts he collected over two years, one wasted trip at a time.

⇒ Outcall Dispatch: Turnaround Time Is the Whole Business

What it costs the night he is off

The replacement does not do a worse job. He does the same job in nineteen minutes instead of eleven, four or five times, and the night ends with two fewer completed bookings than the same night last week.

⭕ Nobody records that as a loss, because nothing went wrong. The bookings that did not happen do not appear anywhere.

⇒ Two Cars, Three Bookings

What it costs when he leaves

Two years of accumulated facts walk out with him, and the next person starts collecting them from zero, one wasted trip at a time, at your expense.

⇒ The Question Nobody Asks A Leaver

Why nobody writes it down

Ask the driver to document his routes and you get a shrug. This is not obstruction. Three things are actually in the way.

He does not experience it as knowledge

To him it is not a list of facts, it is just how you get there. People do not write down what they think everybody knows.

There is no moment in the shift when writing is possible

He is driving, or he is waiting outside with the engine running, or he is done and going home. There is no desk in that sequence.

The last person who wrote something down was never asked about it again

⚠️ If the note goes into a folder nobody opens, the second note never gets written. This is the one that kills most attempts.

⇒ The Booking Note Nobody Reads

What actually collects it

The venues that manage this do not run a documentation project. They attach one question to something that already happens.

⭕ At the end of a run, one field: anything about this address worth knowing next time? Empty most nights. Not empty maybe twice a week.

Six months of twice a week is roughly fifty facts about the addresses you actually go to — which is the list that lived in one driver's head, except now it does not.

The test that tells you whether it is working

Give the notes to a driver who has never done the run and see whether the nineteen minutes comes down. If it does not, you collected the wrong things — usually because the field asked for a route and the useful part was about a door.

⇒ The Handover That Happens In A Corridor

Read next

• Outcall Dispatch: Turnaround Time Is the Whole Business
• What Drivers Actually Cost You
• Two Cars, Three Bookings
• The Taxi At The End Of The Night